A Moving Experience Often Requires Emotional Support

January 19, 1997|By Joni H. Blackman. Special to the Tribune.

Women have been following their husbands around since moving wagons were pulled by horses. What has changed is women.

"A generation ago, a wife's role was to follow her husband and if she had feelings, it was a problem. But all that changed in the '70s, when women became their own person. In years past, many women coped by turning to drugs or alcohol, which typically happens after years of neglect. Our goal is to prevent that," said Laura Herring of St. Louis, founder of The Impact Group, a company that specializes in providing emotional support to families who are relocating.

The trend began when women with jobs outside the home made it clear to their husbands' companies that they needed job-resource assistance. Companies quickly followed up that service with equal assistance for a husband accompanying his wife.

There was even help for transferred children in the form of countless books offering suggestions on how to ease their period of adjustment. But for stay-at-home wives, there was nothing.

While her husband is busy with a new job, she is trying to build a life in a strange place. She spends time worrying about her children and helping them adjust at school in their new neighborhood, and for their sake, she tries to be positive and cheerful about all the changes.

But inside, many women who have moved often because of their husbands' jobs say, the experience is emotionally draining and depressing.

They move in and out of corporate stopovers such as New York, New Jersey, Dallas, Omaha, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, Kansas City and Arlington, Va. In the Chicago area, a common spot on the relocation circuit is Naperville, where transferees stay an average of 2.7 years, real estate agents say.

For decades, corporate wives such as Linda Tessier, who lives in Issaquah, Wash., after five moves, and Jeannette Carpenito, who lives in North Marshfield, Mass., after two moves, have commiserated with others like them they've met along the way, comparing moves and difficult adjustments. They understand others in their predicament well, but companies and researchers have largely ignored these reluctant movers.

Herring is trying to change that. First she wants to build a network of women like Tessier and Carpenito, to get them to talk. And then, she dreams, women across America will dial their husbands' bosses and demand to be noticed.

"I imagine a grass-roots movement of spouses hounding the companies, telling the bosses, `I want you to know it's been a bitch to move. I appreciate all that you've done, but I think you need to know how horrible it is,' " said Herring, who was transplanted as a teen.

Impact and other firms, such as The VanDover Group of St. Louis, provide resource services for employees' families, including detailed, personalized information about schools, churches, doctors, baby-sitters, health clubs, shopping centers, scout troops and hundreds of unusual requests.

Herring said 40 percent of her firm's business is helping stay-at-home spouses. In the last three years, companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Abbott Labs have been offering, through Impact, this "lifestyle resource assistance."

It was also three years ago that Jeanne Brett of Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management published a study called "Pulling up roots in the 1990s: Who's willing to relocate?" After sampling 827 employees of 20 large companies, Brett found that "the single most important predictor of willingness to relocate was spouse willingness to relocate."

The finding was a startling change. Just a decade earlier, other researchers found that a spouse's opinion had no effect on an employee's willingness to accept a transfer, but Brett's results "clearly point to the independent voice of the spouses in the late 1980s," when her survey began.

She concluded that "in the 1990s, corporations are going to have to address the concerns of spouses if married employees are going to remain mobile."

And although the name of the game for these corporate husbands is getting ahead, their wives' lives are often measured in relationships. So when they have to leave family or friends, the effects take a toll.

"The reality is the wife is the heart of the family and whatever her emotions are, it impacts and trickles down to the rest of the family," said Herring. "What we are saying to companies is that if they are to compete for the best and brightest employees, spouses are much more powerful than anyone would ever know."

Take Tessier. Her husband has. Taken her all over the country, that is. In the last six years, Tessier has moved with her husband and two daughters, 5 and 8, to Washington state to New Jersey, to Colorado, to California and back to Washington.